How Is Your Web Traffic? Ah, What Web Traffic?
March 29, 2021
I read an interesting article called “In 2020, Two Thirds of Google Searches Ended Without a Click.” Where are those clicks? The clicks belong to the Google. And your Web traffic? Not so good unless one “pays to play”; that is, buy adds get traffic usually.
The write up explains that data from one outfit which has failed and another called SimilarWeb suggest that more than 60 percent of searches do not end with a click to another Web property.
There is fancy search engine optimization for this situation, but in simple terms, it means that once a query’s results are displayed, Google either answers the question, looks at Google’s in results “cards”, or the user clicks on a phone number. Hasta la vista Web site of yore.
One colorful way to explain this Google strategy of becoming the Web is “click cannibalization.” I like the term. Google is eating the clicks. The long term play is for Web sites to disappear, and the Google will die. But that is unlikely in the short term.
What is happening is that many Web sites no longer get traffic, flail away with search engine optimization craziness, and end up buying some ads. The challenge is for a small out fit to generate enough cash to buy sufficient ads to make it worth the GOOG’s while to direct some traffic to these tiny fish.
The SEO slant inn the write up does offer a solution. The reason? There isn’t one in my opinion. Googzilla likes cannibalization. Yum yum yum.
Stephen E Arnold, April xx, 2021
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